Google Halves IP Retention Time Over Privacy Concerns

Google today agreed to half its 18 month IP address retention policy, in an attempt to use user privacy concerns. Addresses will now be anonymized after sitting in server logs for nine months

Google today agreed to half its 18 month IP address retention policy, in an attempt to use user privacy concerns. Addresses will now be anonymized after sitting in server logs for nine months.

The company set the 18 month time limit in March of last year. Back then, governments were already beginning to raise concern about the company's policy of anonymity. Says Google on its blog,

Over the last two years, policymakers and regulators --especially in Europe and the U.S.--have continued to ask us (and others in the industry) to explain and justify this shortened logs retention policy. We responded by open letter to explain how we were trying to strike the right balance between sometimes conflicting factors like privacy, security, and innovation. Some in the community of EU data protection regulators continued to be skeptical of the legitimacy of logs retention and demanded detailed justifications for this retention. Many of these privacy leaders also highlighted the risks of litigants using court-ordered discovery to gain access to logs, as in the recent Viacom suit.

Upon this most recent announcement, the company issued another response with EU regulators.

The company closed the announcement on a somewhat reluctant note, stating,

While we're glad that this will bring some additional improvement in privacy, we're also concerned about the potential loss of security, quality, and innovation that may result from having less data. As the period prior to anonymization gets shorter, the added privacy benefits are less significant and the utility lost from the data grows. So, it's difficult to find the perfect equilibrium between privacy on the one hand, and other factors, such as innovation and security, on the other.

Brian Heater has worked at a number of tech pubs, including Engadget, Laptop, and PCMag (where he served as Senior Editor). Most recently, he was as the Managing Editor of TechTimes.com. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Beast and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Lucy.
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